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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

As they say: a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. And even that criterium quickly breaks down at mild scrutiny. And not just because of landlocked countries.

Linguists try to draw some lines in the sand, but in the end the reasons we call Swiss German a dialect and Luxemburgish a language are cultural and political.

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> As they say: a language is a dialect with an army and a navy

As opposed to a country, which needs an airline and a beer: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/09/16/beer-airline/

I think the language/dialect distinction is not even helpful - all that counts is what people understand.

As a native German speaker, who never learnt Dutch, I can tell you that I understand nl-NL a lot better than de-CH. There is a reason de-CH is subtiteled in German media.

Politicians are the ones still trying to draw arbitrary lines based on language. Linguists have largely threw in the towel on this quite some time ago.

So if your criterium breaks down, you would agree that you can't map every single language/dialect to a country in a neat fr-BE scheme?

The example given is de-CH and lb-LU - a counterexample for the neat scheme would require separate dialects of the same language within a single country e.g. 近畿方言.

Obviously no, 26² makes 676, and number of languages in the world is estimated to be around 4000 and 8000. Given that 26³ is 17576, you would probably start to have something vast enough with scheme like ab-cd-ef.

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